and sin to the curse breathed upon
him by woman.

The proverbs of a country are the truest test of its sentiments. What have
these to say of the woman of India today?

"What poison is that which appears like nectar? Woman."

"What is the chief gate to hell? Woman."

"What is cruel? The heart of a viper. What is more cruel? The heart of a
woman. What is the most cruel of all? The heart of a soulless, penniless
widow."

"He is a fool who considers his wife as his friend."

"Educating a woman is like putting a knife in the hands of a monkey."

These are a few of the many proverbs which characterize woman in one
vernacular only. Every other Indian tongue equally abounds in proverbial
expressions which brand a woman as one of the greatest evils of the land.
Sanskrit writers have exhausted vituperative language in describing woman.
They represent her as "wily, hypocritical, lying, deceptive, artful,
fickle, freakish, vindictive, vicious, lazy, vain, dissolute,
hard-hearted, sinful, petty-minded, jealous, addicted to simulation and
dissimulation. She is worse than the worst of animals, more poisonous than
the poison of vipers."

These proverbs do not necessarily reveal the depravity of the Hindu woman;
but they do testify unmistakably to the estimation in which she is held by
man.

The ignorance of woman there is dense and is probably a fact which closely
connects her with the proverbial expressions concerning her. Her
illiteracy is not an incident in Indian life. It has been, through the
centuries, a settled policy of the land. At the present time only one
woman in two hundred can read and write in that land of progress. The
remarkable thing is, not that so many are illiterate, but that even a few
have been taught at all, in view of the attitude of the Hindu mind towards
her. In ancient times there was little to learn, in India, apart from
religion; but it has been the strict injunction of their Shastras and
religious instructors that no man shall, under penalty of hell, teach to
his wife or daughter the Vedas which are the purest and best part of Hindu
Scriptures. Any form of useful knowledge was considered dangerous in her
possession.

It is not that woman is wanting in capacity. She is as bright and as
teachable as her brother. All that she has needed, educationally, has been
opportunity; and this, society has denied her, and this has done injustice
not only to her but, still more, to itself.

Infant marriag